Where Should Your Company Blog Live?

child with laptop and 3d blog

Clients often ask me where their company blog should live. Should it be part of their website, hosted on a subdomain, or on an external blogging platform like WordPress?

One solution fits all

Your company blog should live at www.yourdomain.com/blog. Period.

A subdomain like blog.yourdomain.com is not a good choice because this is a completely separate website from the search engines’ point-of-view. So you’d have to build authority for you blog site and your website, thereby working twice as hard! This is also true of a blog hosted on an external platform.

Keep your blog on your website, in a subdirectory named “blog” (like www.yourdomain.com/blog). As Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz notes:

99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it’s the best choice for all parties. Subfolders have all the flexibility of subdomains (the content CAN, if necessary, be hosted on a unique server or completley unique IP address through post-firewall load balancing) and none of the drawbacks. Subfolder content will contribute directly to how search engines (and users for that matter) view the domain as a whole. The link in to subfolders are considered relevant to the domain as a whole, and while this rule applies for many subdomains, the exceptions make it worth avoiding them.

Keeping your blog at your existing domain allows the SEO juice to accumulate for the entire site (webpages and blog posts) as you continue blogging and linking to other internal pages in your blog and website.

Many companies also show “Our Recent Posts” or “New Articles” on their home page, as a way of directing search engines and human users to their blog.

Finally, be sure to add your blog to your top-level menu, as “Blog”, or “Our Blog”, or “Name-of-your-blog Blog”. Again, that helps both humans and search engines navigate your website easily.